Books, Arts & Manners: Random Notes

February Titles: Tony Hiss’s biography of his father, Laughing Last: Alger Hiss (Houghton Mifflin, $8.95), should have been called Whistling in the Wind. Alger doesn’t appear to have laughed—in public, at any rate—since 1949. How, after all, does one laugh and complain at the same time? And, incidentally, about this “last” business: what makes him so sure? . . . David Atlee Phillips has written The Night Watch (Atheneum, $10.95), at once an autobiography and a history of the CIA, in which he worked for 25 years and whose operations he continues to defend. . . . Karon Shanor, author of The Fantasy Files: A Study of the Sexual Fantasies of Contemporary Women (Dial, $7.95), sent out questionnaires to more than three hundred women. The ladies appear to be full of animal aggressiveness but, as PW observes, “the erotic replies of as few as a dozen women tend to sound repetitive.” … In his new novel, Found, Lost, Found, or, The English Way of Life (Stein & Day, $8.95), J. B. Priestley takes satiric stock of the mores of contemporary Albion. . . . Henry H. Adams will publish Harry Hopkins: A Biography (Putnam, $15), a life of the New Deal poet and philosopher who composed the deathless words: “We shall tax and tax, spend and spend. . . .” Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (Basic, $12.50), by Morris Dickstein, describes the coming of the rough beast and its eventual gelding by the operation of Establishment politics. . . . According to Alvin Rosenfeld’s The Plot to Destroy Israel: The Road to Armageddon (Putnam, $8.95), the antisemitism of the Mohammedan religion and the humiliations of defeat at the hands of the Israeli army in 1967 have provoked among the Arabs a spirit of revenge that will not allow them to rest until the state of Israel has been utterly destroyed. . . . Alec Nisbett, a mathematician, has written Konrad Lorenz: A Biography (Harcourt, Brace, $10) about the author of On Aggression, the famous student of animal behavior.

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February Titles: Tony Hiss’s biography of his father, Laughing Last: Alger Hiss (Houghton Mifflin, $8.95), should have been called Whistling in the Wind. Alger doesn’t appear to have laughed—in public, at any rate—since 1949. How, after all, does one laugh and complain at the same time? And, incidentally, about this “last” business: what makes him so sure? . . . David Atlee Phillips has written The Night Watch (Atheneum, $10.95), at once an autobiography and a history of the CIA, in which he worked for 25 years and whose operations he continues to defend. . . . Karon Shanor, author of The Fantasy Files: A Study of the Sexual Fantasies of Contemporary Women (Dial, $7.95), sent out questionnaires to more than three hundred women. The ladies appear to be full of animal aggressiveness but, as PW observes, “the erotic replies of as few as a dozen women tend to sound repetitive.” … In his new novel, Found, Lost, Found, or, The English Way of Life (Stein & Day, $8.95), J. B. Priestley takes satiric stock of the mores of contemporary Albion. . . . Henry H. Adams will publish Harry Hopkins: A Biography (Putnam, $15), a life of the New Deal poet and philosopher who composed the deathless words: “We shall tax and tax, spend and spend. . . .” Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (Basic, $12.50), by Morris Dickstein, describes the coming of the rough beast and its eventual gelding by the operation of Establishment politics. . . . According to Alvin Rosenfeld’s The Plot to Destroy Israel: The Road to Armageddon (Putnam, $8.95), the antisemitism of the Mohammedan religion and the humiliations of defeat at the hands of the Israeli army in 1967 have provoked among the Arabs a spirit of revenge that will not allow them to rest until the state of Israel has been utterly destroyed. . . . Alec Nisbett, a mathematician, has written Konrad Lorenz: A Biography (Harcourt, Brace, $10) about the author of On Aggression, the famous student of animal behavior.